Tailed (19 page)

“He's pretty resourceful.”

“And let's not forget how these little episodes keep throwing a wrench in your career.”

“Pshaw. Garth, there are things more important than all that.”

“You should be in Chicago right now, making a name for yourself.”

Angie and I sat in silence for a little while as the night got darker.

“Let's make a deal.” Angie put out her hand. “I promise not to get killed if you promise not to get killed.”

We shook on it, then kissed on it, huddling close. It was getting cold out in the desert.

“Did I ever tell you about Arnold?”

I felt her nod. “The possum, the one your mother had put down.”

“Of all the things that have happened over the last few years, that still is one of the worst days of my life.”

She gave my arm a squeeze. “Is that why you don't want a dog? Because of Arnold the possum?”

I shook my head. “No, I don't think so.”

That's when we saw headlights approaching the parking lot.

“Security guard?” I looked at Angie.

“Out here?” She shook her head. “I doubt it.”

From reflected headlamp glow we could see the impish figure of the pixie on the side of the dry-cleaning van. The vehicle slowed, then nudged its bumper against the chain link and began to press.

“Uh-oh.” I stood. “Come on.”

As we ran toward the parasaurolophuses, I heard the gate give way and the van roar into the parking lot.

We reached a plywood concession stand and hid behind it. I searched the ground for anything that might be useful as a weapon: a two-by-four, a brick, a bottle, anything. The only thing on the ground were broken tumbleweeds, small stones, and dirt. The door to the concession stand was just plywood, with a simple hasp and padlock, so I kicked it in. Flicking the light switch to the left of the door didn't accomplish anything.

“Here,” Angie said, her house keys tinkling. Her keychain had a miniature flashlight on it, and since we'd been in darkness for a while, the tiny bulb seemed to light up the shack like it was a tanning booth.

The concession stand was largely empty. There was a back counter and a front counter where the stand opened up. Under the front counter were two wide, empty shelves containing a few stacks of dusty sweatshirts with the Dinoland logo. We didn't have to say anything, we knew what to do—put on a couple of the sweatshirts to help stay warm. I put on four, all extra large.

A beam of light shot through a seam at the edge of the shuttered front counter. We put our eyes up to a crack and saw the van slowly drive through the tollbooths and squeak to a stop in front of the fountain, right where we'd been sitting. The headlights blinded us, so we couldn't see anyone inside the van. But I could see the pixie cartoon on the side, grinning. Wilco trotted into the light, wagging his tail.

“Angie, I think we're both going to need to be extra brave. I think the only thing to do is split up. I'll draw them away so you can escape back to the road at sunup. Here, take my jacket. You hide here—with all the sweatshirts you should be able to stay warm enough overnight. It's going to get cold out here in the desert.”

“No, Garth. I'm not staying here alone.”

I held her face in my hands and kissed her, felt her start to breathe heavily as she prepared to cry.

“Yes, you will. It may be our only chance to get out of this. That way you can get the local police or somebody out here to stop all this. I'm not just being manly and protective here—this is for both of us.”

“No!”

“Look, we're together even when we're not physically together, am I right?”

I took her silence to mean agreement, however reluctant.

“Draw strength from me. Then I'll be here with you, and you'll be with me as I lure them away. I'll be careful. Remember, I was a Boy Scout, I can handle it.”

“That was more than thirty years ago.” She loosed one short sob, but then I heard her gulp, sniff, and suppress her fear. “You weren't even an Eagle Scout.”

I rolled my eyes. “Let me tell you, Eagle Scouts aren't all they're cracked up to be, believe me. And just because I only reached the rank of Star doesn't mean I didn't learn a thing or two. I'll be OK, I promise.”

“Remember our deal?” Her eyes searched mine. “No getting killed.”

“It's a deal.” I shook her hand, kissed her forehead, then slid out the door. I kept the concession stand between me and the van as I dashed between the legs of an allosaurus. When I reached a perimeter fence, I found a portion that had been downed by soil erosion undermining some posts.

Now it was time to draw them in my direction. I shouted.

“Wilco!”

Damned if the dog wasn't already at my side, his dog tag winking starlight at me.

We scampered up and over a hill. On the night breeze I thought I heard my name being called. I stopped and listened, heard it again. It wasn't Angie. I shouted the dog's name again to keep them following me, and when I reached high ground and had a view of Dinoland, I could see the van driving off through the broken gate toward the main road.

Be strong, Angie, I'm with you.

chapter 23

T
he dog trotted ahead of me with a distinct sense of purpose. I wished he'd stayed with Angie to keep her warm. Of course, I'd called his name, but I couldn't think of anything else to shout to draw the three Tupelca away that wouldn't sound like I was trying to draw them away.

So why follow Wilco? I figured the snakes would get him first that way, and if nothing else, maybe he somehow knew where he was going. You hear those stories about Eastern families vacationing out West, losing their dog, and the dog somehow finds his way from Golden Gate Park to Darien, Connecticut. As much as I didn't like or trust Wilco, I had to assume he was still a dog at heart, complete with the full package of canine instincts and wiles.

And so we crossed the scrubby terrain dotted with yuccas. The desert night was spectacular—a pellucid sky like the calm surface of a lake through which you could see bright pearls on the dark bottom. Being a city slicker, it had been a long time since I'd seen the stars and constellations so clearly, the coruscant smear of the Milky Way shimmering diagonally across the sky.

I wasn't what you'd call a model Boy Scout as a lad. I reached the rank of Star and rested on my laurels, much to the displeasure of the troop leaders. One is supposed to be always advancing, earning more merit badges, striving to be an Eagle Scout. That irked me—attaining the rank of Eagle Scout was touted as a veritable transcendence into a wholly superior being, as though any scout who didn't attain that rank would have their outdoor skills shrivel up like a dead spider once they moved on from the scouts.

Even though I hadn't attained the godly rank of Eagle Scout, I had retained a few outdoor skills. Granted, after thirty-some odd years, they were a little rusty. Navigation without maps can be complex and disastrous, but I'd been taught that a few basic skills can serve one well. Compared to the star of Bethlehem, the North Star is disappointingly ignominious. But using the Big Dipper, it's a snap to locate the North Star and thus it is easy to get one's bearings. The main thing when lost—as I effectively was—was to move in a straight line and not go in circles. So I kept the star over my right shoulder.

I also knew to keep moving during the cool of night, and try not to perspire all my water away in an hour of blazing sun. But how to find water?

Wilco was following a slight trail that I figured must be a pronghorn antelope or deer trail. I seemed to recall that many game trails eventually led to water. And as it happened, the winding trail led more or less true to the southwest.

You might think I'd be tired after a couple hours' hike. I wasn't. I'd venture to guess New Yorkers walk four or five times as far while commuting and foraging as most suburbanites do in a week of walking only to the driveway or parking lot. So we may not always be the most genial pedestrians you'd ever want to meet, but New Yorkers can walk and then some. I was also keyed up about my predicament. For once I wasn't too worried about Angie. The talk we'd had about being together and yet apart made me feel better. I felt she was safe and tried not to imagine otherwise. She was a heck of a lot safer back there near the road than out in the middle of the desert, I can tell you that.

My mental acuity was further sharpened by what I guess you'd have to call survival overdrive. I had to figure my way out of this. At three miles an hour walking speed, that meant I was approaching ten to twelve miles from Dinoland due southwest. I had not reviewed a map of this area, but I knew southwestern New Mexico to be a sparsely populated region—it stood to reason since they used to detonate atomic bombs down this-away. The last town we'd driven through was an hour north, so sixty-some-odd miles, which put me seventy-two or so miles south, southwest of that town. Granted, that didn't tell me much, but having at least some idea of where I was could be crucial.

And at least I was warm enough. What with all the exercise, I had actually removed two of my Dinoland T-shirts and tied them around my waist.

Wilco led me over a rise. Below was a long flat valley. Unlike the rest of the terrain we'd seen, this was scattered with something that looked ominously man-made. As we approached, the shapes became familiar. Trucks. There was a still-life parade of military trucks and craters stretched toward the horizon. As we approached, I realized we were seeing
what was left
of trucks, personnel carriers, and all manner of military issue vehicles that had been blown up and made into Swiss cheese by machine gun fire. Some of these machines I'd never seen before—wide and stout, sort of like Hummers, but with open backs like a pickup truck, or with a machine gun turret, or with what looked like a tow truck hitch in back. I knew a little about military aircraft and nothing about tanks and trucks and such. But none of that knowledge was required to deduce that we were on a military testing range of some sort. Either planes came in from above, bombing and strafing these targets, or artillery set up on the hills and practiced their mortar fire, or tanks and such flanked the imaginary enemy. Maybe all of the above. Either way, this was a shooting gallery and I was standing right among the ducks. Everything seemed quiet enough now, but what with night-vision technology, I imagined that soldiers might come out here to plink any old time.

Between the shattered vehicles were blackened craters. I climbed aboard a truck hood and scanned the distance by starlight. The junkyard procession stretched for some distance, maybe ten or fifteen blocks—over a half mile. The junk was arranged in a column leading toward the other end of the valley.

For whatever danger this place presented, it was also someplace that had been driven to, meaning that there must be some rudimentary road out of the valley leading to a depot where the trucks came from.

“Now we're getting somewhere.”

Wilco gave me a sardonic look, as if to say “We've been out here a few hours and you're already talking to yourself?”

The dog was four steps ahead of me, trotting down the line of trucks toward the horizon. He looked back at me nervously from time to time and seemed uncertain of this new route we were taking.

Some of the trucks we passed were burned-out shells, but others were only partially damaged or flipped over. I imagined each of these vehicles had a story, had people and lives attached to them. These relics were totems to a past of drama, of life and death and heroism. To me they were also a testament to man's legacy of war, of grave miscalculations on a global scale. A legacy of fear, of imagined solutions through death that we have all inherited. Hey, I'm not a simpleton, I don't pretend to have the answers. Our planet is an immensely complex orb. But standing in the desert at night among these vehicular tombstones, the world suddenly looked like a sad place where we're all haunted by our legacy of war, where many of the events of our personal history are unduly influenced by forces outside ourselves.

Not too unlike me, cursed by the legacy of my grandfather.

“‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!'” I shouted theatrically, gesticulating toward the great accumulation of wrecks. My bold dictum echoed faintly across the desert. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'” Then there's the legacy of an English major—literary and remarkably apropos witticisms on demand.

My audience had taken that opportunity to lick his balls. I guess it was a bit much to expect Wilco to be a Shelley groupie.

Walking alongside the trucks meant climbing in and out of craters, so I elected to cut through the wrecking yard and get onto even ground on the other side. That's when I noticed a half-track with a faded white star on its flank. Sort of like the ones the Germans had on
Rat Patrol.

“Wow!” I had to go up and touch it. To the uninitiated, a half-track is more or less like a large pickup truck in front but has treads like a tank in the back. The front bumper looks something like a cow catcher on an old locomotive, but with what seems like a massive steel rolling pin horizontally across it. I imagined this was designed for smashing into and rolling over obstructions. I put my hands on the rear treads and was surprised that they were not giant links of steel like on a tank but more like a large corrugated fan belt. It felt like a tire, but in a strip with crosswise treads that went around all the rollers and sprockets.

A machine gun was mounted over the passenger side of the cab, and there was an open back for troops. There was no roof at all, and no divider between the back and the cab. Aside from a few bullet holes, it appeared untouched. I climbed up into the back. How could I resist playing with the machine gun?

The gun was mounted on a circular ring of iron sort of like an open turret. Rollers on the gun mount allowed the gunner to swing the gun a full 360 degrees around the metal ring. Pushing aside a few heavy metal containers, I ducked under the ring, stepped onto the passenger seat, and into the center of the turret. I grasped the worn handles on either side of the gun and tried to roll it sideways. It wouldn't budge, but I was able to pivot the heavy gun up and down. The breech atop the gun was closed, but after fiddling with it, I managed to flip it open. I then had the fun of slamming it shut—ah, the sweet sound of war machinery! How often I had seen movies and TV shows where soldiers opened the breech, slapped in a belt of ammo, and slammed the thing closed again, ready to mow down the enemy. I wondered if the half-track had ever seen action, whether the gun had ever been fired against an enemy.

I know, it was kind of pathetic, but I couldn't help having a romantic notion of war. That's how it was sold to me as a kid. Gritty men in desperate circumstances, sticking it out, pushing themselves to the limits of their physical and mental abilities. Heroics. I also believed that somehow men's fascination with war was genetic. Little wonder if it was. How else to explain how men are so reliably duped into thinking that purposely subjecting themselves to mortal danger—to dying a slow miserable death on a battle-field, their guts hanging out—could be fun?

I looked around like someone might catch me climbing down into the driver's seat. The weathered seat cushion crunched under me as I assumed command.

“Cool.” There were two large dials to my right, centered on the dashboard, and a smaller dial on the left and a huge steel steering wheel in front of me. On the right was a large angled floor shifter, with another one in front of that. Farther right on the dash was a glove compartment, hanging open. How odd, I thought. On a hook on the dash between me and the glove compartment hung goggles.

Just after passing through the McEscargot in Reims, France, September 1944:

“Aw, Sarge! They forgot to give us ketchup. How am I supposed to eat my snails without ketchup?”

“Calm down, Dooley. Check the glove compartment. I think there are some ketchup packs in there under the maps and wet wipes.”

I glanced to my left and saw Wilco staring up at me from the ground, clearly impatient with my dawdling. But how often do you find yourself able to play with military ordnance?

I noticed there was no place for a key. Well, I guess that would be kind of stupid.

“Dooley, you have the keys?”

“I thought you had them, Sarge.”

“Darn it, Dooley—they're on the seat. We're locked out. Go to that farmhouse and see if you can find a coat hanger.”

But there was a black button on the dash between the two big dials, a switch below that, and below that a series of plungers—one would be the choke. I flipped the switch, depressed the black starter button and there was a loud grinding sound under the hood.

“Whoa!” The half-track had obviously been put out there relatively recently, as it hadn't been blown up, and someone had to start it to get it there. Nobody around to steal the battery. And I couldn't imagine a soldier charged with driving the half-track out there wouldn't fill the tank. Why chance running out of gas along the way? Uncle Sam paid for the gas. So maybe there was enough fuel to go somewhere if I could start her—much less drive her.

I pulled out the plungers and cranked it again. This time the starter caught the flywheel, and instead of a grinding sound the half-track went:

Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh…

It was turning over sluggishly. A loud backfire sent Wilco running. Then there was a belch of smoke and the half-track rumbled to life, pretty as you please.

I cackled with glee.

“So
cool
!” Women have their foibles and men have theirs—namely that there's a ten-year-old inside who still commands the ship at a moment's notice. The engine jounced and vibrated the whole truck, the rattle of metal all around me.

Could I figure out how to get the thing in gear? I mean, I knew how to drive a shift, but I knew nothing about driving a truck, much less one that was part tank. Terms like “double-clutching” left me wondering if there shouldn't be an extra pedal somewhere.

There were four levers to my right. One was labeled
TRANSFER CASE,
which I surmised was for the cable winch I spied under the front rolling pit. The other was labeled
TRANSMISSION
, and another to engage the front-wheel drive. There was also a large hand brake.

I depressed the clutch, wobbled the transmission gearshift, and felt around the shift plate for the H pattern. Well, it was more like an H with an N to one side where reverse was. I tried front left, let the clutch out slowly, and the machine lurched forward so violently that it stalled. Trial and error followed, but the end result was that I got the thing moving and out to the side of the junkyard. I'd figured out what double-clutching was: you had to depress the clutch to go into neutral, let it out, and then push it in again to put it into gear. Double-clutch:
duh
! I also wondered again about how much gas it had—I peered closely at the dials and none of the three seemed to be working.